I am anxiously awaiting the release of SS4 due out any day now. I thought it would be good to have a place to consolidate all reviews, questions and comments about the release hence this post.

One of my questions is how have the major releases been handled in the past? I just purchased Pro a month or so ago and would expect it to be a either free or reduced price being so recent of a purchase.

how is it looking to run with iOS7? will it get along? i ask because if there are potential issues, i would rather keep my iPad 2 running iOS6 where it works fine.

There are two known problems with SS3 on iOS 7. First, the toolbar buttons lose the text under them and you have only the icons. Second, the popup alerts are bright white in Night Vision mode. We have a fix for the first and are waiting for the next iOS beta to see if the alerts revert back to the old style. We will be releasing a new SS3 soon after iOS 7 comes out to fix these problems.

IOS 7 is requiring extensive rework of SS4's UI so it will fit in well to the new look and feel. I've spent the better part of the last 2 weeks making UI changes. SS4 will *require* iOS 7. It is just too hard to design it to be back-compatible with older versions of iOS.

There may happen eventually. Hopefully it will make it into the initial release of SS4. Note that only the data could be moved to the external SD card. There is also a good chance that the app will run noticeably slower after doing so. Most removable SD media is slower than internal.

I have a first gen ipad running SS3. When you release SS4, will you keep SS3 available in the app store? I don't want to accidentally overwrite my current app and then not have a version that runs on my hardware. What will users of iOS 6 or earlier have to do to prevent losing SS3?

Piglad, can you explain that more? That would only work if someone had parked a copy of their app in the cloud, right?

As to the App Store, old versions of apps are often, if not typically, removed, so they can no longer be downloaded again.

That's why it's a really smart idea to save a backup of your iTunes folder (or, more precisely e Mobile Applications folder), especially before a major set of app upgrades.

As another protection, after upgrades, you can also fish the old versions out of the Trash just in case, you discover a new version drops features,adds ads, or is problematic. It's pretty easy to reinstall an old version of an app.

All purchased apps are stored in the Cloud. Open the App Store app and click on the the Purchased tab. Apps that are installed have an OPEN button. Apps that are not installed have a CLOUD button so you can download again.

Yes, but if the app is removed from the App Store then it is no longer in that "cloud" and you will no longer be able to run it. Some of our customers got bitten by this when we had to remove SkySafari 2 from the App Store.

We've fixed a few problems in SS3 that were caused by iOS 7. We will submit a new version to Apple tomorrow. Not clear how long it will take for approval. I can imagine they are pretty backed up with developers submitting new versions right now.

The bugs were mostly aesthetic things so it's not like you can't use the existing SS3 on iOS7. The tool bar lost the text labels under the icons and the alerts that pop up when in night vision are bright white.

Considering it's going to be an iOS 7 centric product, one really cool addition would be utilization of the new bluetooth game controller support. Would allow people to slew the scope and select slew speeds from physical buttons on a game controller case without taking up screen real estate.